Tuesday, September 13, 1983

Pat Benatar “Love Is a Battlefield” released

Love Is a Battlefield

Pat Benatar

Writer(s): Mike Chapman, Holly Knight (see lyrics here)

Released: September 13, 1983

First Charted: September 24, 1983

Peak: 5 BB, 4 CB, 3 GR, 3 RR, 1⁴ AR, 17 UK, 2 CN, 1⁵ AU, 1 DF (Click for codes to charts.)

Sales (in millions): 1.0 US, 0.2 UK

Airplay/Streaming (in millions): -- radio, 127.8 video, 170.62 streaming

Awards:

Click on award for more details.

About the Song:

Pat Benatar’s 1979 debut album, In the Heat of the Night, peaked at #12 and sold a million copies. Over the next three years, she released three more studio albums, all of which reached the top 5 on the Billboard album chart and sold at least a million copies. In 1983, she released her first live album, Live from Earth, and racked up her fifth platinum album.

The album featured eight live songs alongside two new studio cuts. Both of them – “Love Is a Battlefield” and “Lipstick Lies” – were released as singles. While the latter failed to chart, the former became Benatar’s biggest hit, climbing all the way to #4 on the Billboard Hot 100. VH1 ranked it as one of the 100 greatest songs of the 1980s. ^WK It also garnered Benatar a fourth consecutive Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.

One of the songwriters, Mike Chapman, had success as a producer in the 1970s and early ‘80s with Blondie, Exile, the Knack, Huey Lewis & the News, Suzi Quatro, and the Sweet. He and the other writer, Holly Knight, would go on to write Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good to Me” (1984) and “The Best” (1989). Knight also wrote John Waite’s “Change” (1982), Animotion’s “Obsession” (1984), Scandal’s “The Warrior” (1984), and Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll” (1987). She also penned “Invincible,” another top-10 hit for Benatar in 1985.

As Knight recalled, she was at Chapman’s house when Benatar called and asked him to write a song for her. The pair started working on “Love Is a Battlefield” as soon as Chapman got off the phone. ^SF They wrote the song as a ballad but Benatar’s husband and guitarist Neil Giraldo turned it into an uptempo song. At first Knight and Chapman hated it, but when it became a hit, Knight said, “We had to step out and say, You know, they did a very good rendering of it, and that’s how it was meant to be.” ^SF

The video was directed by Bob Giraldi, who’d also famously done Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Benatar is a rebellious teenage girl kicked out of her home who becomes a taxi dancer. When the club owner harasses one of the dancers, Benatar leads a rebellion against him. After she helps the other dancers, she leaves, “heading for parts unknown” in the final scene showing her sitting in the back of a bus. ^WK